On New Day Saturday, CNN host Christi Paul gave liberal MoveOn.org activist Anna Galland a forum to promote weekend protests against enforcing border security laws, which included references to the Holocaust against Jews in Nazi Germany as well as the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. The CNN host even sounded like she thought it was a good idea to make such comparisons as she suggested that it might be effective in winning people over.
As she introduced the segment at 8:05 a.m. Eastern, Paul avoided a "liberal" or "left-wing" label and merely described MoveOn.org, the SPLC, and Amnesty International as "civil rights organizations." Galland soon tried to portray the blatantly political events as nonpolitical:
It is not left and right -- it is right and wrong. People are standing up and saying families belong together. We need to end this horrific practice of separating children from their parents. We need to end the interment camps for families which are being built, you know, being planned on military bases as we speak. And we need to end this zero tolerance policy or zero humanity policy, it might be better known.
At the only time when she came close to posing a contrarian question, host Paul suggested an answer to her own question as she invited her liberal guest to explain why the events are not really "political." Paul:
There are a lot of people who are watching who might think, 'Well, we do need to secure our borders.' Can you just give us some clarity here? This is more a protest for human rights for humanity than it is political -- would that be safe to say, to some degree?
Garland soon worked in a Holocaust reference:
We know the long-lasting traumatic effects on children of being forceably separated from their parents. And, indeed, we will hear today in Washington from a Holocaust survivor who was separated from her parents in that era -- from a survivor of the Japanese-American internment camps, one of the darkest moments of our history. And others who have experienced that trauma and can speak to it first hand. This is a moral moment.
The CNN host approvingly responded: "Yeah, those stories are the ones that really wake people up maybe if they aren't quite sure what they think necessarily about a particular issue -- or if they are able to see it in a different light."
No mention was made that the Obama administration also had a history of detaining illegal immigrant families, and even sometimes separating children from parents, as has been reported by both Fox News Channel and even MSNBC.
